Every public school district has a lunch program and about 75% of districts also offer breakfast to students. Traditionally, school nutrition falls into two broad traditional categories—privately and publicly managed nutrition programs. According to a CDC report in 2006, about 75% of school districts run their own publicly-managed food service program. When publicly managed, the school district or institution manages the food service, orders and prepares the food items and maintains the expense of a kitchen and kitchen staff. Following this model, the kitchen staff is required to order and prepare the food, plan the menus, and do the bookkeeping, accounting and similar administerial tasks. Maintenance of a kitchen, kitchen staff and nutrition program by a school district or other institution is typically not economically feasible within their limited budgets, especially when the district is below a certain size. There are also frequent health and safety issues.
Every public school district has a lunch program and about 75% of districts also offer breakfast to students. Traditionally, school nutrition falls into two broad traditional categories—privately and publicly managed nutrition programs. According to a CDC report in 2006, about 75% of school districts run their own publicly-managed food service program. When publicly managed, the school district or institution manages the food service, orders and prepares the food items and maintains the expense of a kitchen and kitchen staff. Following this model, the kitchen staff is required to order and prepare the food, plan the menus, and do the bookkeeping, accounting and similar administerial tasks. Maintenance of a kitchen, kitchen staff and nutrition program by a school district or other institution is typically not economically feasible within their limited budgets, especially when the district is below a certain size. There are also frequent health and safety issues.
The remaining 25% of schools that offer breakfast or lunch use an outside food service management company to operate the school nutrition services program for their district. In some instances, the school district contracts with private management companies to provide complete food management services, but not to supply a la carte food items. For example, these companies offer menu ideas, recipes, employee training, purchasing assistance, inventory control, and other management services. In other instances, the management company not only runs the service, but also supplies the ala carte food items. Either way, because these private, outside management companies supply meals to a number of institutions, they are able to split the cost of the kitchen facility and staff over a number of school districts or other institutions resulting in lower food costs.
Recent studies have shown, however, that although the average cost of a lunch from a privately managed service may be lower than a publicly managed service, there is no evidence that privatized nutrition services yield savings for the school districts or institutions. For example, although labor costs may decrease there are increased fees that need to be paid to the private contractor. Similarly, although food costs decline with private management, this reduction is offset by the rise in the relative cost of supplies for disposable cutlery, plates, etc. Furthermore, there is no savings in transportation cost.
Another disadvantage under privatized management is the districts and students have little to no input or choice in terms of food selection. In many instances, the food transported to the school is the only choice available to the student. Although there may be greater variety in the situation where the private contractor is also supplying a la carte items, private management is more often associated with a less diverse food selection for the students. Privately managed nutrition services also tend to provide a larger selection of high-fat and high-sugar items, which typically are chosen by the students over the “healthier” items.
A third category of privatized food service is a catering food service. Under this type of food service, the school district contracts with a catering institution that allows individuals at a number of different schools to order their desired food items from the catering organization. For example, US Pub. No. 2009/0198547 A1 discusses the use of a single caterer (or multiple caterers) to provide individualized meals for customers at a number of different institutions via a central catering system. As with the publicly managed food service programs, the catering service model offers no competitive incentives or purchasing power to lower the customer's cost of individual food items within the school nutrition program. In fact, from a practical standpoint, the former catering service model is too expensive to be sustainable and does not result in money being returned back to the school district. Additionally, this system does not ensure “healthy” food items and food safety within the smaller, individual catering businesses is difficult, if not impossible, to monitor and manage.
Fast food and “fast casual” restaurants, also known as quick service restaurants (QSRs), represent one of the largest segments of the food industry. QSRs are known for their short food preparation time. Some of the largest national players in this category include Dunkin Donuts, McDonald's, Subway, Chick-Fil-A, Wendy's, and Burger King. Newer “fast casual” restaurants, on a national scale, include Chipotle, Panora Bread, and Au Bon Pain and can also include coffee house chains such as Starbucks. For purposes of this invention, QSRs also include national and regional supermarket chains that provide “prepared food”, such as Whole Foods Markets, Tops and Wegmans, as well as regional/local fast casual chain restaurants.
Record numbers of obesity over the past few years, in both children and adults, have drawn attention to the need for healthy lifestyle choices and have resulted in a general trend towards health and wellness, including healthy eating. This trend toward healthy eating has forced QSRs to develop and add new, healthier offerings to their menus. Many QSRs have removed trans-fats and other unhealthy ingredients from their offerings, have increased menu items that contain fruits or vegetables, and have increased menu items that are labeled as either vegetarian, organic and/or “healthy.”
No system presently exists that enables an institution, such as a school district, to contract with multiple QSRs to provide a variety of healthy, low-cost nutrition services to student within a school district via a centralized, internet-based food management program, wherein the individual student's daily food selection is processed as a transaction between the student and QSR, and where money is ultimately returned back to the school district.
U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/498,821, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, describes the system and method of the present invention, a privatized, competitive nutrition service created for the benefit of the individual participants (i.e. student/parent), the school districts and the local, contracting QSRs. Another aspect of the invention is to provide a system and method for a privatized nutrition service with a variety of healthy food items for children to select while at school. The system and method also provide advertising means for contracting QSRs at the corporate level and provide educational means for teaching nutrition, encouraging higher education and energizing competition. Additionally, the internet-based ordering, delivery leasing program and school refund program gives back money to the school districts.